


Symbols of a Nameless God

by persephone_garnata



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Anal Sex, Cecil is Mostly Human, Horror, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Mostly cute though, Moving Tattoo(s), Some Humor, Some Plot, Tattooed Cecil, Tentacle Sex, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-20
Updated: 2015-03-20
Packaged: 2018-03-18 19:45:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3581634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/persephone_garnata/pseuds/persephone_garnata
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos invites Cecil over for a romantic dinner. Cecil reveals how he got his distinctive eye-and-tentacle tattoos... then things take a turn for the weird. Then sexy. Then weird again. Then sexy again...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Symbols of a Nameless God

**Author's Note:**

> This is my very first fic on AO3 so I hope I've done all the tagging right and it's not full of typos! It was originally going to be a cute romantic dinner fic, then I guess I got a bit carried away, much like Cecil's tattoos.   
> I'm British but I've tried to write in American-style English to suit the source material, please let me know if I've left in any glaring British-isms.

‘Hello Carlos.’  
Cecil’s voice was as smooth and sonorous as ever, and it sent a little shiver down Carlos’ spine as he pressed the phone to his ear.  
‘Hi Cecil. We’re not on air, are we?’  
A tiny pause told Carlos all he needed to know, and he sighed inwardly. Sometimes, he thought, it would be nice to have an actual private life, rather than have every detail of his most intimate relationship broadcast to the entire town. But hey, he supposed some things just came with the territory when you were dating the voice of Night Vale.  
‘Listen, I finally found a shop in town which sells decent seafood – boy was that place difficult to track down, even with Science – so I thought I could cook us that stew I told you about, that my mom used to make.’  
‘Sure, that sounds nice.’  
‘And I bought some more candles – vanilla scented. They should be safe.’  
‘Are you sure? We don’t want a repeat of last time.’  
‘Ok, I said before, when I saw candles labelled “black magic” I assumed it was the name of the perfume, I didn’t realise I was supposed to take it literally! Anyway, I’m certain these vanilla ones will be fine, I ran some tests on them and they contain only trace amounts of goat’s blood.’  
‘If you’re sure.’  
‘I’m sure. So – do you want to come over to my place? Tonight?’  
‘I would love that. What time? With the new watch you got me I can tell the time very accurately, you know.’  
Carlos smiled, and blew a silent kiss into the phone. Getting a genuine timepiece into Night Vale had been very expensive, and very dangerous, but it was worth it to see – and hear – how happy it made his Cecil. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a genuine timepiece himself, so it wasn’t possible to time things very accurately from his perspective, but never mind.  
‘Let’s say… eight o’clock.’  
‘Neat. See you then.’  
‘See you.’  
Carlos hung up, and stood, smiling stupidly to himself, for a whole minute (as best he could estimate) before he wandered into the kitchen to try and subdue the seafood.

It was eight o’clock on the dot – by Cecil’s shiny wristwatch – when he knocked on the door of Carlos’ house. It was an unassuming house, on the Desert Creek housing development, with nothing on the outside to suggest that it was the home of Night Vale’s strongest jaw and most perfect hair. Carlos opened the door, wearing his best lab coat - the one designed by Karl Lagerfeld - and Cecil kind of wished he’d gotten changed out of his work clothes – but then, he’d hardly had the chance, it had been such a busy day, what with that computer at the Elementary School achieving sentience and taking over the town, and then all that filing to catch up on…  
The scent of vanilla wafted to Cecil, and he saw Carlos smile and show his perfect teeth, and he forgot all about the long day he’d had at work, and everything else too.

‘Cecil,’ murmured Carlos, looking his boyfriend up and down. He was wearing the clothes he always wore to work – the gray flannel pants, the purple sweater vest with matching necktie. His mop of blond hair looked dishevelled, as if he’d spent a lot of time running his hands through it, and his shirt sleeves were rolled up, revealing some of his impressive tattoos – a purple mass of eyes and tentacles that moved in a gently undulating motion when you looked at them from the corner of your eye. And the third-eye tattoo in the middle of his forehead – at the moment partly covered by an unruly cowlick of hair – looked back at Carlos, its pupil in the shape of a heart, throbbing.  
Carlos grabbed Cecil’s left hand, pulled him against his body, kissed him on the lips, and then, with a quick glance over his shoulder at the Sheriff’s Secret Police van parked across the street, led him into the house and closed the door behind them.  
‘The stew’s on,’ he said, as they went through to the open-plan living space. Vanilla-scented candles were dotted about at strategic locations, their smoke rising in wisps and dispersing harmlessly, definitely not forming any sinister shapes looming in the air. Spicy stew bubbled away atop the stove, a few tentacles reaching up and curling over the side of the pot, groping towards the oven dials or the knife rack. Carlos went and prodded them back into the gumbo with a spatula. While he did so, Cecil stood behind him, winding his arms around his waist, pressing his face into his neck, brushing his thick black hair aside with his nose.   
‘Mmm, smells good,’ he said, although it wasn’t clear whether he meant the food, the candles, or his lover’s golden brown skin. Or maybe, all of them at once. He kissed the nape of Carlos’s neck and nibbled his ear lobe, while Carlos leaned back into him with a sigh, putting one hand over Cecil’s and using the other to swat away a wandering tentacle.  
‘Wait,’ he said, ‘that didn’t come from the stew.’  
He pushed Cecil away, gently but firmly. ‘What…?’  
‘Sorry,’ said Cecil, putting his hands sheepishly behind his back and blushing. ‘I should have told you before… sometimes, when I get a bit excited, my tattoos get, um, excited too.’  
‘Right…’  
They looked at each other in silence for a moment, and then Carlos shook his head. ‘This is scientifically fascinating,’ he said. ‘How on earth do you get living tattoos? No, wait, don’t answer just yet, let me pour a glass of wine and we’ll sit down first.’

Shortly afterwards, they were sitting on the couch, sipping at the finest Pinot Bleu Carlos’ money could buy, while Cecil thought how best he could explain. He’d known, of course, that sooner or later, if things with Carlos went as far as he hoped they would go – that is to say, all the way – he would need to broach the topic of the tattoos which covered an extensive and variable part of his body. It was just – there had never seemed to be a particularly good time, even with his new wristwatch. Well, as they say, no time like the present. Unless it’s already the past. He swirled the well-oaked wine around his mouth, swallowed, and began.  
‘Well…’ he said, ‘the thing is, I don’t actually have any tattoos. As such.’  
‘No? That’s weird, ‘cause it kind of looks like you do.’  
‘Yeah, I know, but they’re actually… the symbols of a nameless god.’  
Silence. Carlos raised his eyebrows, and took a long drink of wine. ‘Care to explain further?’  
Cecil shifted uncomfortably, pulling a throw pillow out of the small of his back. ‘A few years ago, long before you came to Night Vale, when they were digging the foundations for a new housing development – actually, come to think of it, it was this housing development – the builders stumbled across – actually fell into – a large cave, deep underground.’  
He took another sip of wine. ‘The cave had apparently not been opened for centuries, with no way in or out except the hole the workmen’s jackhammers had made. Yet inside burned candles – hundreds and hundreds of candles. Of course I had to come and investigate, and do a live report for community radio.’  
‘Of course.’  
‘I climbed into the cave, down a rope-ladder with rungs made from human femurs, as per Night Vale building regulations. I descended, from the light of the desert sun, into the light of those candles, burning with unnatural fire. They weren’t vanilla-scented. They smelled like the dust from a long-forgotten tomb, with notes of cinnamon and raspberry. By their flickering, unsteady, sickly light, I saw – oh, I saw…’  
Here Cecil shuddered and knocked back the rest of his wine. Carlos silently filled his glass again and then went to fetch another bottle. After settling back – moving the throw pillow again – Cecil resumed his tale.  
‘I saw that the walls of the cave were completely covered in murals, all painted in a lurid shade of purple by hands – or other appendages - which had never seen the light of day... Tentacles coiled all over the place, twisting in the candlelight, seeming never to end… Thousands of eyes stared down at me, unblinking and merciless. I landed on the floor of the cave near a pile of bones, bones of creatures which had lived their twisted lives and died their agonizing deaths in the darkness far below the earth millennia before humans had ever dreamed of consciousness. But it wasn’t just a haphazard pile, oh no.’ Another gulp of wine. ‘The bones formed an altar, and it whispered in my mind, in a language no human mouth could form nor human ear decipher, telling me that it was an altar to a nameless God, a God who needed no name, a God known only by blank helpless terror, and that the paintings all around me were the symbols of this God, who had lain deep underground for countless centuries but had now been awoken.’  
Carlos got up to stir the stew, poured them both some more wine, and then sat back down on the couch next to Cecil.  
‘And then what?’ he asked.  
‘Hmm?’ said Cecil, who had been staring into his glass. ‘Oh, and then my memory is sort of a blank for a while. The next thing I remember is waking up, back on the surface, and the workmen told me they had heard a loud rumbling sound, like the stomach of a great beast growling with hunger, and that the ground had started shaking. The hole spat me and the rope ladder back out, and then closed up, leaving no sign that it had ever been. Then one of them said to me, “Hey, did you have those tattoos before?” And I said, “what tattoos?” And he said, “That eye in the middle of your forehead, and the tentacles all down your arms.” And I said, “Hey, I’m pretty sure I’d have noticed getting a tattoo of an eye in middle of my forehead, and tentacles all down my arms,” and he said, “Well apparently you didn’t,” and I looked down at myself, and saw I was covered in the symbols of the nameless God.’  
‘Right – okay,’ said Carlos, trying to digest this story.  
‘It’s fine, really,’ said Cecil, ‘they don’t make an oddly pleasurable tingling sensation all that often, and they rarely whisper in my mind in a language no human mouth could form nor human ear decipher any more, and they hardly ever get out of control. Not for months now. Several weeks. Okay, it’s been at least twenty-four hours since the last time. Before tonight, that is.’  
‘So you say they, um, get excited when you do?’  
‘Yeah.’  
‘How excited?’  
Cecil took a long drink of wine, and hurled the throw pillow, which had somehow worked its way back into an uncomfortable position again, across the room.  
‘I’m not entirely sure. Because, you see… since that time, I’ve never really – been excited – with another person. Not until you came to town.’  
‘Right,’ said Carlos slowly, putting his glass down on the side table and leaning in to Cecil. ‘So what you’re telling is that this relationship – us – is kind of an experiment?’  
‘I guess so,’ said Cecil, putting his own wine down, leaning in a little closer.   
‘And you don’t know how it will end.’  
Their noses were now almost brushing against each other.  
‘No.’  
‘Let’s find out.’  
Their lips met. Once, and then again.  
And then they shifted closer still, and parted lips, and pushed tongues inside each other’s mouths, breathless and reckless, until their glasses bumped together and they paused to smile and Carlos pushed Cecil’s thick purple frames up into his mussed blond hair, and Cecil pushed Carlos’ wire-rimmed half-moon spectacles up into his immaculate black hair with the dignified, yet premature, touch of gray at the temples. And then, in the new, slightly blurry world thus revealed, they moved in as close as they could get, arms around shoulders, chests and hips pressed together, tongues back where they belonged, and tentacles wrapping around Carlos’ body and tugging at the buttons on his lab coat.

‘Ok, wait a sec,’ said Carlos, drawing back slightly from Cecil, who couldn’t help letting out a little squeak of longing.  
‘What’s the matter?’  
Carlos took a few deep breaths, while one tentacle worked open the top button on his lab coat, and another reached inside, tangling in his chest hair.  
‘This is all quite new to me,’ he said, gesturing at the roaming appendages, ‘and I think you have an unfair advantage. I only have the two hands after all.’  
‘I’m sorry. I’ll try to – calm down.’  
‘Oh, there’s no need for that,’ said Carlos, and even if he hadn’t said it, his smile would have had the opposite effect in any case. He leaned forward over Cecil, making him lean back slightly, and pulled his sweater vest off over his head. He threw it across the room with a perhaps foolish disregard for the fact that dozens of candles were still burning, and it landed on top of the throw pillow which was now scuttling its way back to the couch.  
‘I’ve always wondered,’ he said, looking the now-panting Cecil up and down and licking his lips, ‘how far those tattoos go.’  
‘Well, they kind of move around a lot, but they usually cover most of my chest and –’  
‘Wrong answer,’ interrupted Carlos, holding his finger over Cecil’s mouth to shush him. He leaned in, close, causing his glasses to fall back down over his eyes. ‘The correct answer was, “Well why don’t you find out?”’  
‘Oh,’ said Cecil, lost for words for once, as Carlos started slowly undoing his necktie and unbuttoning his shirt. The tentacles which extended out from his arms started reaching out from his chest as well, their softly undulating motion almost hypnotic. Once he had gotten the shirt open, Carlos saw a purple mass of them without an apparent centre, writhing all across Cecil’s chest. But more than them, Carlos saw the eyes – hundreds of eyes, of different sizes, all unblinking, staring from between the tentacles, from Cecil’s forehead, from all over his body, and every single one of them with a heart as the pupil, gazing up at him adoringly.  
‘Oh, Cecil…’  
Carlos pushed the shirt back from Cecil’s shoulders, kissing his neck, feeling the soft touch of the tentacles on his own now-bared skin, the pull of the suckers as they left lines of tiny hickies. Thanks to their quiet work, his lab coat was now on the floor, his belt was undone, and his flies were half-way there. Mostly, they reached out for him, removing his clothes, winding round his limbs – but one curled back on itself to reach into Cecil’s pocket and remove something, holding it out to him. A tiny little packet, he saw. A condom.  
‘Cecil, are you sure…?’ he said, looking at his boyfriend, one eyebrow raised.  
Cecil laughed. ‘I’ve been sure since the moment I first saw your smile.’  
‘Ok.’ For a moment Carlos felt as if he couldn’t breathe, and wondered if the candles were sucking the air out of the room, or if some kind of strange vortex had opened – but no, nothing weird was going on this time, it was just good old lust. For his tentacled, many-eyed lover, marked by a Nameless God. He bent down and undid Cecil’s flies, sliding his hands inside the waistband of his pants and his underwear, over his hips, pulling the cloth downwards and away from his skin. Cecil bucked his hips up from the couch and moaned loudly, and when Carlos’s hands brushed his cock, all his tentacles spasmed at once. They grabbed hold of Carlos and pulled the both of them violently to the floor, rolling over several times before coming to rest with Cecil lying on his back and Carlos on top of him. Only the throw pillow scooting itself underneath Cecil’s head had saved him from concussion.  
‘Are you all right?’ asked Carlos, struggling to prop himself up with his hands while the tentacles continued to wind around him, pinning him against Cecil.  
‘I’m ok. Just a bit – over-excited. How are you?’  
‘Fine. I’m fine. Now – where was I?’  
He succeeded in pulling free just far enough to reach into Cecil’s pants again, and pull them down. The tentacles, getting the idea, helped out, and then one of them wound itself around Cecil’s dick, jerking him off.  
‘Hey,’ said Carlos, batting it away and replacing it with his own left hand. ‘That’s for me only.’  
The tentacle slid down between Cecil’s thighs, and he slapped it away again with his right hand. ‘And so is that.’  
Cecil just moaned, throwing his head back, his glasses lost somewhere, his hair a mess.  
‘Do you have any-’ Carlos started to ask, but before he could even finish the question, the tentacle he had so recently fought off slithered into his right hand, coating his fingers in some slick, shiny, faintly purple substance.  
‘I guess you do,’ he finished, and reached forwards, into the dark space between Cecil’s legs, until his finger found the hole he was looking for. It slipped in easily, as did the second.  
‘This stuff is so much better than the lube you get from drugstores,’ he said, pushing his fingers farther in until Cecil’s sudden cries of pleasure told him he’d found the sweet spot. He massaged it gently while sliding in a third finger, stretching, opening. As he concentrated, the tentacles worked on their own tasks: stroking his hair, leaving more hickies all across his neck and shoulders, pulling down his pants and his underwear, caressing his balls, making sure his own cock was standing fully to attention – which didn’t take a whole lot of effort.   
‘Do you know what happened to-’ he started to say, but again, the tentacles were a step ahead of him. One curled up to present him with the condom; another tore open the packet, and a third slid it onto his dick.  
‘Very efficient,’ he said with a gasp, as a fourth slathered its natural lubricant all down his shaft, ‘but still, there are some things only I can do. Are you ready?’  
‘Yes, please, oh yes… Carlos, I need you inside me…’  
Carlos removed his hands from Cecil’s body and put them instead on the floor, on either side of his shoulders. Cecil moved his legs apart and his tentacles guided Carlos carefully forwards until…  
‘Oh yes, just there, just like that…’ The tip of Carlos’ cock pushed against Cecil’s hole, and then inside, further and further in, penetrating him as he moaned wordlessly and stretched up, lifting himself from the floor with his elbows until Carlos grabbed hold of his hips and supported half his weight, leaning back and pulling him back against his body so he was inside him as far as he could possibly go.  
‘Cecil, Cecil…’ Carlos breathed hard, gripping even harder, his fingertips digging into Cecil’s flesh as he felt his lover all around him. He shifted so he could start thrusting, slowly at first, then faster, his ears filled with the sweet groans of that delicious voice, his eyes closed, all his sensation focused on the squeeze and the friction as he slid deeper into…   
Abruptly he felt something else, round the back. Something soft and slippery, snaking itself down his spine and into his crack and then…  
‘Cecil, what-’  
It, whatever it was – and he thought he had a pretty good idea – spread viscous fluid around his hole and then eased itself inside.  
‘Cecil, we didn’t discuss-’  
It pushed farther in, reaching for his sweet spot with unerring precision, latching a sucker onto just the right –  
‘Cecil, I don’t know if-’  
Another tentacle joined the first, both of them writhing inside him, sending judders of unholy pleasure all over his body. Carlos opened his eyes, saw the world had gone blurry, and realized he had no idea where his glasses were – and that he wouldn’t have been able to focus on anything in any case.  
Even so, it seemed like the room had gotten an awful lot darker – as if the candles had been snuffed out and some great shadow had been laid over the house. Then he heard the chanting, vibrating through his skull. Chanting in a language no human mouth could form nor human ear decipher. Chanting which told him that here was one marked with the symbols of a Nameless God, a God who needed no name, a God known only by blank helpless terror. A God who had lain deep underground for countless centuries, who had been awoken, and whose servant now roamed the world, seeking out new sacrifices, new victims to form a new altar so that all might know of the awesome power of the –  
‘Carlos, my perfect Carlos, I’m so close, please won’t you take me there…?’  
Carlos snapped his attention back to his boyfriend. He shifted weight around so he could free one hand and take Cecil’s cock into his palm, trying hard to concentrate on bringing him to completion whilst those strange voices still echoed in his mind, and those tentacles still wriggled in his asshole – it felt like a third one had snuck itself inside him while he was distracted. Luckily, it didn’t take long for Cecil to tip over the edge. Carlos felt the tentacles stiffen a split-second before he saw Cecil come all over his own chest, his tattoos shimmering in a haze of ecstasy. And his voice… hearing his name called out like that, in that honeyed voice, normally so deep and controlled, now high-pitched and broken…  
Carlos came so hard, and so suddenly, that it took him almost by surprise, and he could barely even make a sound.  
Slowly, he lowered Cecil back to the floor, and collapsed half on top of him. The tentacles withdrew from him with a loud slurping sound which he would normally find disgusting, but now seemed… just right. Gradually, they all pulled back into Cecil’s chest, turning once again from eldritch abomination into hardly-moving tattoos. The two men breathed together, lying in each other’s arms.  
One by one, the candles flickered back to life, and the room filled with light. Whispers sounded from some source that could not be pinpointed. They were in a language no human mouth could form nor human ear decipher, and they said that the Nameless God, while it still needed no name, had now decided that it would henceforth be known not by blank helpless terror but by the altogether more pleasant feeling Cecil and Carlos had introduced it to. Its parting message, just before the whispers faded into the background static of the universe, was a faint echo of that feeling, which sent a delightful aftershock through the lovers as they lay entwined.  
‘That was – wow,’ said Carlos.  
‘It sure was. Sorry if the tentacles were a bit much.’  
‘No, they were – well, let’s just say, I think I’m now spoiled for anyone who doesn’t have tentacles. And those eyes – they’re so beautiful.’ Carlos traced his fingertip around the edge of the nearest one, just below Cecil’s collarbone.  
‘Nothing is as beautiful as you.’ Cecil sighed, and kissed Carlos on the jaw, the cheek, the temple…  
There was a loud hissing sound, followed by a clatter. Carlos sat up abruptly.  
‘Oh shit, the stew! I forgot all about it!’  
He leapt to his feet, but had also forgotten that his pants were still around his ankles, and so fell back down in an undignified fashion.  
‘Should it have climbed out of the saucepan and be rummaging through the cupboards?’ Cecil asked.  
‘No, oh crap, that means it’s boiled dry, and it’s completely ruined!’  
‘Fancy pizza instead? Big Rico’s has a special offer on at the moment…’  
‘But I wanted to cook you the seafood stew!’  
‘Carlos,’ Cecil said, taking his hand and kissing his forehead, ‘you can cook for me another time. It’ll be even tastier for the wait.’  
‘Oh, very well,’ said Carlos, pulling up his pants. ‘I’ll just wrestle the stew into the garbage, and we’ll go out for pizza.’  
‘Or… we could order takeout, and you could take your pants off again.’  
Carlos smiled, and let Cecil’s hand – and other appendages - wander to his waistband.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Adopting a Mental Pet](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4945738) by [Savain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Savain/pseuds/Savain)




End file.
